Extremely Slow Windows XP Shutdown – Fixed

Several years I had this problem in one particular instance of Windows XP Professional – an extremely slow shutdown upon clicking on Shutdown button. For several minutes system would completely freeze, and then Shutdown/Restart dialog box would finally come up.

What did I know about the problem. It was extremely annoying. It was persistent. And it was happening only on one instance of XP, so that excluded the possibility of a faulty hardware.

It was so bad, that I came up with a workaround. I would open up a Task Manager and end one after another svchost.exe processes running under SYSTEM name. A counter and warning would appear saying that your system will be shut down in one minute. At this point I would be able to press a normal Shutdown button and restart within seconds.

At one point I needed to move this instance from old PC to a new one. To my disbelief the problem persisted on the new PC as well. At this point I started to search up and down the Internet for an answer.

Microsoft troubleshooting document suggested to check shutdown from a Safe mode. If it is fast, the problem is with one of the services that needed to be stopped upon shutdown. And yes, my shutdown from Safe move was very quick.

I am ashamed to admit that only after that discovery I finally looked at event log. It was right there in black and white:

The server {9B1F122C-2982-4E91-AA8B-E071D54F2A4D} did not register
with DCOM within the required timeout.

The persistent error right around the shutdown time and the error mentioning time out. Jackpot! Computer is trying to do something and freezes for several minutes before coming back after time out.

The actual fix was simple and prosaic. I searched registry for this long string {9B1F122C-…} and simply deleted it.

That is it. The very next shutdown was perky, and snappy, and fast just like on a brand new installation.